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RSS is back
Just a quick note to point out that I have resurrected the RSS feeds. Required a little bit more PHP, but wasn't too daunting, and now you can once again subscribe to a whole feed or category-specific feeds using the links to the right. Alternately, I've added the proper tags so that IE7 and later pick up on the appropriate feed and "light up" to let you know there is something worth subscribing to.
More to come this coming week once the long holiday is through....
What the Hell Happened?
Four months of no posts, and then a curious "under construction" message. What's up with that?
Well, you can blame it on porn spammers and WordPress. Turns out there is some sort of juicy exploit in WordPress that allows porn spammers to slip in hidden links on your home page, and this site was ruthlessly attacked. I tried upgrading to a newer version of WordPress a while back, screwing up my site layout in the process, and the problem came back even worse than ever.
So I have now sworn off of blogging software. What you see now is the result of a few hours of my own PHP coding. It is way simpler and doesn't allow comments to be posted, but I'm not quite sure it was worth the risk of exploits to allow people to post back to the blog.
I'm also hoping to use this as an opportunity to relaunch the site with a bit more of a personal bent. I'll surely still discuss MAME issues here, but now that the MAMEDev wiki is up and running, a lot of articles I used to post here will now appear there. In fact, I have been slowly chipping away at documenting my new universal dynamic recompiler architecture on the wiki, so feel free to have a look if you want to know how it all works.
Of course, this universal dynamic recompiler is what has been taking up most of my time, and why I couldn't be bothered with a few measly hours of PHP scripting to resurrect this site until it was mostly up and running. This has long been a dream of mine, and I've slowly worked out how to make it happen over the past 5 years or so. You can also thank my wife's company for sending her on several business trips at the start of the year, which gave me the large blocks of time necessary to get a real leg up on the project that has stalled several times over the course of the past few years.
California Extreme is coming up again shortly (it seems to get earlier and earlier each year), and of course, I'll be there to check out the games and hobnob with many of the folks I've worked with over the years on MAME. If you're in the San Jose area, I highly recommend stopping by for at least a day. (Plus, my real motivation for going is to indulge in at least one In 'n Out run — apologies in advance to the friends whom I mercilessly beg for rides!)
That's all for now. Hopefully I'll follow this up with more posts shortly. :)
P.S. I do have one bit of help to ask for: if you are a CSS/HTML wizard and happen to be able to help out, I need to figure out how to ensure that the white background of the posts extends to the bottom of the right-hand column. See this post for an example of the bad behavior. Drop me a line if you know how to fix that particular problem.
Upgrade Time
Finally time to upgrade my site to the latest WordPress. Sad thing is,
I had changed quite a bit of the layouts to make it mesh with my previous
site, and boy what a pain it was to re-create that. It's still not 100%
back to where I'd like it, but that's all the stylesheet hacking I can
handle. If someone with more HTML experience is out there and can help
me figure out how to make the navigation class work properly on the archive
pages, please contact me. I've had enough. :)
Back in Action
With luck, I think I have this WordPress thing mostly figured out. I imported all of my MoveableType posts, got into some trouble with my new hosts in the process ;) (hint: having your new blog spam you with 1000+ emails does not tend to make a good first impression), and fixed up the email form so it works again. Let me know if anything else looks odd or strange moving forward.
After such a good start…
I've not been particularly good at posting here recently, have I? I've had a few things to take care of recently, having to do with trademark issues, bringing up mamedev.com, dealing with ingrates, and taking over managing the releases of MAME. I've been trying to set up things that will make it easier to deal with some of these issues over time, but it may be difficult to post additional detailed technical articles for a bit until I catch up.
Anyway, I've got a bunch of movie reviews to feed this page for the next few days, and not much additional news beyond what's been posted over on mamedev.com. Hopefully once I've exhausted the movie backlog I'll have some actual interesting things to say regarding MAME.